Workforce Planning is a continual process used to align the needs and priorities of the organisation with those of its workforce to ensure it can meet its legislative, regulatory, service and production requirements and organizational objectives. Workforce Planning enables evidence based workforce development strategies.

Workforce Planning Definitions

Workforce Planning is the business process for ensuring that an organization has suitable access to talent to ensure future business success. Access to talent includes considering all potential access sources (employment, contracting out, partnerships, changing business activities to modify the types of talent required, etc.). By talent is meant the skills, knowledge, predisposition and ability to undertake required activities including decisions making. Strategic Planning considers the business risks concerning insufficient, disrupted, mis-deployed talent on the organization's business priorities. Workforce planning is considered an iterative discipline. The cycle of workforce planning includes filling resource requests, analyzing resource utilization, forecasting capacity, managing and identifying the resources (human) to fill that capacity, and then re-starting the cycle.

Strategic Workforce Planning is broader and longer term than operational Workforce Planning. Strategic Workforce Planning is the framework applied for Workforce Planning and Workforce Development, where the links between corporate and strategic objectives and their associated workforce implications are demonstrated. Strategic Workforce Planning should take into account the projected loss of knowledge through employee exits and the projected knowledge requirements for sustaining and progressing the business. Knowledge requirements may include technology, new skills, new roles, documentation of key workforce intelligence or new business demands. Operational Workforce Planning is narrower in context and shorter term than strategic Workforce Planning. Operational Workforce Planning involves the systems and processes adopted and evolved to enable strategic Workforce Planning through the production of the evidence required for executive decision-making on workforce matters. Operational Workforce Planning should initially be process based and focused on building understanding and capabilities in Workforce Planning, supported by simple tools, templates and techniques. Once established and practiced, these tools, templates and techniques can become more sophisticated and linked to existing or new IT systems to enable Workforce Planning to be integrated into normal business practice.

One of the more restrictive and potentially dangerous assumptions is that Strategic Planning is only about talent in the form of employees. Hiring is a strategy for accessing talent and will often be the superior one. However, the use of employees to meet talent needs carries with it unique risks that can be mitigated using alternative access sourcing arrangements. Regardless of the access source used, insightful assessment of the strategy's attendant business risk is prudent.

The process for starting out Strategic Workforce Planning is linked with the organization's strategy. This means identifying the critical talent needs that if not met can materially adversely impact business success. Once the business risks are fully appreciated then attention turns to schedule and timing. Assessing current internal capability and assessing its relative position when it will be called upon in the future. Speculating on future sourcing options and identifying the preferred sourcing option. Implementation and execution follow. Attention to periodically reviewing the "sanity" of the current plan is prudent.

Workforce Analytics Approach

The focus is to analyse current and historical employee data to identify key relationships among variables and use this to provide insight into the workforce they need for the future. Workforce analysis usually includes reviewing employee recruitment, promotion and turnover patterns. In addition the analysis can also include reviewing the age and gender profiles of the workforce.

An analytical approach is important as it provides a fact based method of understanding workforce behaviours. Workforce analytics also provides further context to workforce planning efforts by ensuring perceived workforce behaviours are consistent with actual behaviours identified using a more quantitative approach.

Modeling Approach

This approach incorporates forecasting and scenario planning. Forecasting uses quantitative data to create forecasts incorporating multiple what-if and modeling the future. Scenario Planning being the more useful tool where there are uncertainties, therefore incorporating quantitative and qualitative.

Segmentation Approach

Breaking the workforce into segments along the lines of their jobs and determining relevance to strategic intent. Provides a technique for prioritizing.

Steps in Workforce Planning

Though there is no definitive ‘Start here’ activity for any of the approaches to Strategic Workforce Planning, there are five fundamentals activities that most Workforce Plan models have:

• Environment Scan
• Current Workforce Profile
• Future Workforce View
• Analysis and Targeted Future
• Closing the gaps

Environment Scan

Environment Scanning

Environmental scanning

Environmental scanning is one component of the global environmental analysis. Environmental monitoring, environmental forecasting and environmental assessment complete the global environmental analysis. Environmental scanning refers to the macro environment.The global environment refers to the...

 is a form of business intelligence. In the context of Workforce Planning it is used to identify the set of facts or circumstances that surround a workforce situation or event.

Current Workforce Profile

Current State is a profile of the demand and supply factors both internally and externally of the workforce the organization has ‘today’.

Future Workforce View

Future

Strategic foresight

Strategic foresight is a fairly recent attempt to differentiate "futurology" from "futures studies". It arises from the premise that:*The future is not predictable;*The future is not predetermined; and...

 View is determining the organization’s needs considering the emerging trends and issues identified during the Environment Scanning.

Future View is often where the different approaches identified above are applied:
Quantitative futuring: understanding the future you are currently tracking to by forecasting;
Qualitative futuring: scenario planning potential alternative futures in terms of capabilities and demographics to deliver the business strategy.

Analysis and Targeted Future

Qualitative and quantitative futuring creates the content for an organizational unit to analyse and identify critical elements. As the critical elements are identified the Targeted Future begins to take form. The targeted future is the future that the organization is going to target as being the best fit in terms of business strategy and is achievable given the surrounding factors (internal/external, supply/demand).

Closing the Gaps

Closing the gaps is about the people management (human resources) programs and practices that deliver the workforce needed for today and tomorrow. The process is about determining appropriate actions to close the gaps and therefore deliver the targeted future.

There are 8 key areas that Closing the Gaps needs to focus on -

Resourcing, Learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

 and Development

Professional development

Professional development refers to skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement. Professional development encompasses all types of facilitated learning opportunities, ranging from college degrees to formal coursework, conferences and informal learning...

, Remuneration

Remuneration

Remuneration is the total compensation that an employee receives in exchange for the service they perform for their employer. Typically, this consists of monetary rewards, also referred to as wage or salary...

, Industrial Relations, Recruitment

Recruitment

Recruitment refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting qualified people for a job. For some components of the recruitment process, mid- and large-size organizations often retain professional recruiters or outsource some of the process to recruitment agencies.The recruitment...

, Retention

Retention

Retention may refer to:* Retention, in learning, the ability to retain facts and figures in memory ** Selective retention* Cultural retention* Customer retention...

, Knowledge Management

Knowledge management

Knowledge management comprises a range of strategies and practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute, and enable adoption of insights and experiences...

, Job design.